The Dilemma of Sustainable Procurement: An Exploration of Challenges in the Context of Multi-theoretical Perspective

Sustainable procurement adoption is slow in many developing countries. Apart from the general need for exploring the issue from a qualitative perspective, there are specific calls to address the challenges leading to slow adoption of sustainable procurement in developing countries. This study explores the challenges of sustainable procurement from a qualitative perspective in the context of principal-agent and stakeholder theories. A qualitative approach is adopted to interview 20 personnel along the supply chain of two teaching hospitals in Ghana and 4 officials from 3 regulatory institutions. Interviewees are selected with the use of snowballing and purposive sampling techniques. Results indicate five challenges of SP including economic, political, bureaucratic, legal, and technical challenges with thirteen sub-challenges. Further exploration finds that the combined effects of ill-fated interests from sections of stakeholders and malfunctioned principal-agent relations contribute to narrowing the gates for adopting sustainability procurement. The multifaceted nature of the challenges demands that any attempt to address them must be multifaceted as well. Again, because an organization’s quest to maintain good relations with certain stakeholders, like customers, suppliers, and workers, may lead the former to a dysfunctional behavior such as procuring unsustainably, the study recommends that decision-makers be adequately skilled to be able to identify stakeholders with good intent from those with bad intent. They should also be well-resourced and be trained on how to refuse ill-fated demands from ill-fated stakeholders. While the study illustrates some novel challenges of sustainable procurement, such as logging and breaking of bulks, it also gives a clear explanation of how several known solitary challenges such as the individual political challenges combine to affect sustainable procurement. The study provides explanations on how stakeholders and principal-agency relations can sometimes malfunction against sustainable procurement adoption.